TELEVISION REVIEW | 'RICKY GERVAIS: OUT OF ENGLAND'; He's Out for Laughs, And No One Is Safe

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: November 14, 2008

Anybody can make fun of cancer. It takes a little more nerve -- and impeccable timing -- to tell jokes about cancer, H.I.V., autism, fat people, Rosa Parks and the Holocaust.

Ricky Gervais has reserves of both, and he draws on them deeply in his new comedy special, ''Ricky Gervais: Out of England,'' on Saturday on HBO. Most of the jokes in this 70-minute stand-up routine are scatological, smutty or politically incorrect, almost as if Mr. Gervais were testing squeamish American audiences to see just how far they will let him go. And mocking Nazis for not being able to find Anne Frank (''She had time to write a book!'') is at the outer limits.

Mr. Gervais perfected his bravado, and his boorish comic persona, in the original BBC version of ''The Office,'' and later in ''Extras'' on HBO, channeling the prejudices and insecurities of the Everyloser. Onstage he blends the best, which is to say the worst, of his two most obnoxious characters: the slimy self-delusion of David Brent, the branch manager who alone thinks he is funny, and the aggrieved hostility dished out by the failed and perpetually humiliated actor Andy Millman.

At one point he sneers at the notion that Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who has Lou Gehrig's disease and speaks through a voice synthesizer, is a genius. ''He's pretentious,'' Mr. Gervais says, taking a swig of Foster's. ''Born in Oxford and talks with that fake American accent.''

When Mr. Gervais takes a poke at Sting or Nelson Mandela, his own mock personality -- suspicious, small-minded and sarcastic -- is at the core of the joke. He doesn't let up: his is a very British kind of comic brinkmanship, remaining in character and nerve-rackingly callous until the audience surrenders.

There are American comedians who have that gift for deadpan misanthropy, notably Larry David on ''Curb Your Enthusiasm,'' but it's harder to pull off in a stand-up routine. Mr. David doesn't do stand-up anymore; the most successful American comics, like Chris Rock, usually have winning stage presences that soften the crueler portions of their acts. (It's worth noting that Steve Carell, who stars in the NBC adaptation of ''The Office,'' is very funny in the role Mr. Gervais created, but his is a sweeter, softer incarnation.)

Mr. Gervais, who has a stocky body and small, uneven and uncorrected teeth, doesn't try to be likable. And he is impersonal, rarely telling tales about his childhood in Reading or his parents. The one biographical tidbit is a lewd story about a schoolmate who he says was the model for Gareth, the idiot office manager in ''The Office.''

This comedian doesn't adjust his wording for American audiences. And at least one joke is already outdated. He talks about doing a show in Los Angeles for a cancer charity and boasts that he raised ''thousands of dollars, or hundreds of pounds.''

He pauses a beat, then asks, ''What's it like being a third world country?'' The performance was taped before the financial meltdown pulled the British pound down to our level.

It's a one-man show, and that is perforce not nearly as rich as Mr. Gervais's two television series, which among other things allowed him to interact with other characters to create the most painfully embarrassing moments, as well as to flesh out the poignancy of the losers he portrays so brilliantly.

But Mr. Gervais and his writing partner, Stephen Merchant, believe in quitting while they are ahead. They stopped making ''The Office,'' a huge hit, after only two seasons, and shut down ''Extras,'' also after two seasons, with an 80-minute finale. This special may be all there is for a while.

The discomfort zone is central to his humor, yet some of his choicer bits in the special are not about Hitler, anal sex or penis size but about children's nursery rhymes and trivia Web sites. He riffs on a believe-it-or-not site about animals that claims ''stroking a spider can cause it to go bald.'' Mr. Gervais is aghast, but mostly contemptuous.

''Is that a problem in the arachnid world, premature balding?'' he asks. He then acts out a scene in which a spider returns to his web, and his fellow spiders pick on him for hiding his hair loss under a baseball cap. The sketch has nothing to do with sex, race or obscenity, but the anthropomorphic shadings of embarrassment and petty cruelty are still unmistakably Gervaisian.

Shocking audiences is the easiest way to get a laugh, which is why so many stand-up comedians these days rely on X-rated material, ethnic slurs and spews of profanity. What's remarkable about Mr. Gervais is that he can do all that, and less.